John Clarke’s final TV bow to air in Aussie
‘‘I’m no good at pretending to be someone. It’s hard enough working out who I am.’’
That’s just one of the many revelations made by the late Kiwi comedy legend John Clarke in an interview set to debut on Australian TV last night.
Recorded last year as part of the ABC network’s Meet the Mavericks series, the half-hour show (dedicated to Clarke, who died in April this year), sees the Palmerston North-born satirist ‘‘in conversation’’ with British comedian Alexei Sayle.
Filmed in Melbourne laneway bar Golden Monkey, the pair set out to discuss ‘‘performing, writing and sheep’’, lightly interrogating each other about their philosophies, careers and shared arrival in London in the early 1970s.
As avuncular and charismatic as ever, Clarke recalls on the show that a particular early influence on his love of language and style of comedy was listening to shortwave radio coverage of the Australian Parliament.
‘‘I remember listening to it one night and one member said of another, ‘he hasn’t got the brains of a sheep’. The other person objected and the speaker said, ‘yes, that’s unparliamentary – please withdraw that’. So, he then says, ‘I’m sorry – he has got the brains of a sheep’, which was deemed acceptable.’’
After arriving in London in 1971 to film The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, Clarke says while he was delighted to meet the likes of Clive James and Peter Cook (‘‘I remember everything they told me. They were a little bit older and seemed to be like Romans’’), he quickly knew Britain wasn’t the right place for him.
‘‘I knew the audience in New Zealand.
‘‘I had a country to run,’’ he quips.
However, while he achieved great success as a performer on his return home (thanks largely to his iconic alter-ego Fred Dagg), Clarke says it wasn’t until he shifted to Australia in the late 1970s that he ‘‘learnt the importance of writing and what you were actually saying’’.
‘‘I’d been making it up. I didn’t use a pencil, I was using my memory.’’
He says he decided to start out in radio across the ditch because he didn’t know the ‘‘sub-language, the football or the placenames’’.
‘‘It wasn’t my history. I needed to lay low for a while and learn.’’
In a particularly poignant moment, Clarke confesses to Sayle that ‘‘my job wouldn’t have been any use to me if it hadn’t gotten older at the rate I got older’’.
No New Zealand network has yet confirmed if it will screen the episode or series.